


u-chebin estel anim

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Category: Inception (2010), TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 20:59:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2482223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Go to sleep."<br/>"I am asleep. This is a dream."</p>
            </blockquote>





	u-chebin estel anim

_Do you remember when we met?  
I thought I had wandered into a dream. _

At twenty-one, Estel designs a park that’s very like one he knew as a child, all dappled twilight and delicate bridges, a river flowing through a ravine, a library on a hill. Projections fill the park: smiling families, girls walking dogs, old married couples wandering arm-in-arm through the slender paths. The park is his senior thesis in dream architecture, and Elrond Peredhel is his advisor. The park is perfect. He’s certain of it. He has hopes of receiving a recommendation, of continuing at the Paris academy as a graduate student.  
  
Instead a woman walks out of the trees, and his heart stops. She is the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in his life—which is impossible. He designed this park, his subconscious created these people. He’s alone inside his own head. Except he’s sure, in some bone-deep way, that he couldn’t have imagined this woman, her clear blue eyes, her dark hair swept up in a ponytail. His projections look unsettled, suspicious glances already landing on the stranger.  
  
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says.  
  
“Hello, Estel,” she says, and her smile is easy and full. “I’m Arwen, and I’m very impressed with your work. Right now, I’m also your graduate studies application. Convince them not to kill me—“ she gestures gracefully to his projections, who have formed a loose ring around them, “—and you’ll get four years at the Academy, fully funded. Do you understand?”  
  
An old woman has picked up her cane threateningly. A previously mild Labrador begins a low threatening growl. “I understand,” Estel tells her, and offers his hand. She takes it.  
  
Arwen, it turns out, is Professor Peredhel’s daughter, a graduate researcher in dream theory herself. She speaks fluent French, English, and Arabic, teaches intermediate courses in performance history. She got her first degree in theatre when Estel was still in secondary school. She’s doing brilliant research into forgery, and he’s never felt more invested or elated in his work than when he talks it over with her. She has more money than she knows what to do with, she’s spoiled and slightly conceited and six years older and he falls in love immediately, hopelessly, without reservation.  
  
He’s never sure why she loves him back, but when she presses his hand to her heart and says “Trust me. Trust this,” he does. He trusts her with his research, with his body, with his sanity every single time he goes under. Why not with everything?  
  
_Go to sleep._  
_I am asleep. This is a dream._  
_Then it is a good dream._  
  
They become thieves by mutual agreement, less out of a desire for money than a desire to see what else they could do, how far they could go. They’re young and brilliant, and Dreaming is very new. They’re academics at heart, in love with the possibility of it all, for everything they can find out in the field that they never could in the university. They agree that the laws will catch up with them eventually, that in time they can publish everything they find under their own names. But even then there’s something else—the sheer pleasure in doing something difficult, in being the best. After their first job Arwen drops her disguise and pulls him into a dark corner of the dream to kiss him so senseless that they almost miss the dropoff in reality. “Let’s do this again,” he whispers, and she grins.  
  
Estel starts going by his middle name out of fear of being traced back to his mother, and Arwen has a screaming fight with her father once he realizes what she’s gotten herself into. They choose their totems: his is a ring that is only engraved when he’s awake, hers is a white and silver necklace that emits rather than reflects light in a dream. She wears it under her shirts so as not to give herself away to the mark with the small persistent glow.

Sometimes they work alone, but they quickly develop favorites. Friends, even. Boromir is an extractor, Legolas who was Arwen's dramaturg in university works point. They always work together. No one complains. They’re the best there is. They’re happy. They have false passports and false degrees and real families and real friends and Aragorn thinks distantly that maybe they can’t do this forever and Arwen just looks at him with her pale eyes and asks why can’t they? Who’s going to tell them no?

After a while Arwen gets pregnant, and they get married, mostly for his mother’s sake. They already know they’re spending this lifetime together. She’s just barely showing at the wedding, and her dress is pale green instead of white and her hair is so dark against it and she smiles at him like they’re on a job, like they’re getting away with something. He loves her so much he swears he’d die for her.

He’s wrong about that.  
  
_I would rather live one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone_.

Eldarion is born and they don’t stop. They hire a full-time nanny, the daughter of a friend in the business, someone who won’t question the hours they spend locked in their bedroom, unconscious. Elrond is furious with them, but nevertheless moves to be closer to his grandson.  
  
Then Boromir dies on the job, and for a while they do stop, shaken out of their complacency. Legolas moves in, ranks closing in around them, and Eldarion starts calling him uncle. They stop pulling jobs and start doing more research on their own. They begin experimenting with dream layers—not just two, but three.

One day they try to go even deeper.  
  
They get lost.    
  
They build cities for themselves, beautiful many-spired things, full of towers and courtyards and white trees. They populate those cities with their friends, with endless copies of their son, with the daughters Arwen is convinced she has—that she will have—that she has had and lost. The stars wheel overhead, and ages of the world pass. They love each other in all the ways they know how, in all the ways their childhood dreams prepared them for: Arwen dances alone under hemlock trees, Aragorn sets himself an impossible quest to win her love. Arwen chains him to a mountain with a chain that cannot be broken and Aragorn begs her to set him free, neck tilted up to death. She cuts off his hand and nurses him back to health and he adores her, conjures up an army of evil things to kill just to prove himself. Arwen creates gods, vast powerful absurd beings who pronounce judgment and punishment, who lift Aragorn and Arwen from the earth to place them among the stars. Aragorn is king, and Arwen is queen, and they are sick with their love, sick with their own eternity. Aragorn plucks off his unmarked ring, his totem, and throws it into the fire, watches words of fire blossom on the smooth metal. Arwen helps him to destroy it, then hurls her own necklace to the floor where it shatters.  
  
Aragorn cuts himself trying to pick up the pieces, and the shock of his blood on the shards of luminous crystal reminds him of some basic truth. “It doesn’t end here,” he says, voice cracked. “The journey doesn’t end here.”  
  
“We’re dreaming,” he tells Arwen.

“Of course,” she tells him. “We’ve always been dreaming.”

He can’t remember the truth—Paris and her father and Eldarion seem just as implausible as the many worlds they’ve built, Gondor and Rivendell and monsters in the earth. “Please, we have to try,” he begs her, regardless, creating a knife in his hands.  
  
“You cannot ask me this,” she says in tears, and wrests the knife away.  
  
_If you trust nothing else, trust this. Trust us._  
  
There is a place in Arwen’s mind, deep and secret. A place he is ashamed to know. He takes her to her own heart and he plants something foreign there, and it is the most shameful thing he has done in his life. The most shameful thing he can imagine.

Arwen’s heart is a dark ocean underneath a starry sky, a small grey boat with white sails. Arwen is at the helm, ageless in the twilight. “We have to go West,” she tells him, open and trusting.  
  
“No,” Aragorn replies, almost choking on the words. “No, I cannot. Will you come with me, _meleth-nin_? Wherever I go?”  
  
She takes his hand, presses a trusting kiss to his knuckles. “I choose you,” she whispers, and closes her eyes. “I choose a mortal life.” He draws her to the prow of the ship, their hands still joined, and they fall together into the black water.  
  
They wake in another world of their own creation, and this time they do not argue. Arwen leads him to the tallest tower in their white city and they jump. They find their way out painfully, with knives and guns and swords, with twin pistols pressed to each other’s brows.   
  
"I trust you," she says.   
  
"I love you," he says.

When they finally wake up, it’s been six hours in real time. Eldarion is spending the night at his grandfather’s house, and they rush out of the house past a frantic Legolas, drive over even though it’s three in the morning. They break into the house and sneak into his bedroom, and as soon as Aragorn sees his sleeping son’s face he collapses, legs giving out beneath him. He draws in horrible panicked breaths and reaches out with shaking hands to stroke his son’s hair.   
  
Arwen doesn’t step forward. Her face is very white against the darkness. "This is wrong," she says, and the little break in her voice terrifies him. "We need to keep going."   
  
_Why do you linger here when there is no hope?_  
_There is still hope._  
  
Elrond is so furious he can barely speak to his son in law, and when he looks at his daughter he is afraid.

Arwen pretends to get better, goes to therapy, plays with her son, but whenever she and Aragorn are alone she pleads with him to reconsider, to please wake up.  
  
"Don’t you remember our daughters?" she begs him with red eyes. "Eleniel, and Merda? Didn’t you love them at all?"   
  
"It was a dream," he says, barely able to get the words out. "It was a dream, Arwen. Nothing more."   
  
"I don’t believe you," she says, desperate and full of love. "They’re real. They’re waiting for us. So is Eldarion—our son, our real son. They _need_  us.”   
  
"Trust me," he pleads, brushing the necklace that always hung at her breast. "This is real."   
  
She rips the necklace off and puts the little white jewel in his hand, folding his fingers over it so neither of them can see if it's shining or not.  
  
"I know what’s real," she tells him.   
  
A week later he finds her in Eldarion’s room with a gun in her hand. For a second he can’t move, watching with dull horror as she kisses their son’s forehead, draws the gun up to her own temple. He must make a sound, because she sees him and sighs, carefully puts the gun on the floor. He picks it up with shaking hands, desperate to keep it away from her.  
  
"There is nothing for you here," she says, aching tenderness on her face, framed by the open window. "Only death."   
  
"Please," he begs her, the gun dropping uselessly from his hand. "Please, please don’t go."   
  
"Trust  _me_ , Estel,” she says. She smiles, full of hope and joy, and he knows this is his fault. His doing.  
  
_But you will linger on, in darkness and in doubt._  
  
Aragorn is the prime suspect in his wife's murder.  
  
His father in law gets custody of Eldarion. Aragorn goes to Legolas, and the two of them become inseparable in their grief, returning to work. One day they’re hired to extract from a woman too powerful to be manipulated, and that goes terribly wrong. They put together a team to perform inception. Aragorn cannot be the architect. He has a shade, lovely and deadly and always waiting for him in the dream.  
  
Elrond reluctantly points out a young man still getting his degree, even more promising than Aragorn at that age.  And so Frodo Baggins is their architect, Legolas runs point, Gimli is their reluctantly hired chemist, a woman named Tauriel is their forger. It is harrowing and difficult, but they succeed. Aragorn, after all, has done it before.  
  
But this job gives him a passport, erasure, a clean identity. He goes home to Eldarion, weeps with exhaustion and joy.   
  
_I looked into your future and I saw death._  
_But there is also life_.  
  
Arwen is awake. She was under for forty-eight hours, and woke up to find her father sitting by her bedside, his eyes red with exhaustion. She remembers distantly that she and Aragorn were in the living room when they first went under—she’s in a hospital bed now.   
  
"Where are they," she asked him hoarsely.   
  
"Eldarion’s at school," he told her at once. "The twins are with Legolas."    
  
"My husband," she asked against all hope. He did not answer.   
  
Her daughters are three months old, twin girls with soft dark hair and small warm fingers. Eldarion is four, and keeps asking when his father will wake up. Soon, Arwen tells him, because there is still hope. There is always hope.  
  
When Arwen sleeps, she does not dream.   
  
_I gave hope to men. I keep none for myself._  
  
When you go deep enough that you get lost, you forget how things work. Totems are not infallible. Inception is not possible. What your heart tells you is sometimes the truth. She haunts him. He closes his eyes and she’s there, pressing a soft kiss to his lips, whispering prayers for his safety against his skin.   
  
"You told me once this day would come," he says, and it is all right that he says it because he is only dreaming.   
  
"This is not the end," his shade tells him softly. "It is the beginning."   
  
"My path is hidden from me," he says, but he strokes his hand against her familiar cheek, lingers on her smooth neck.  
  
"It is already laid before your feet," she says, and leans into his touch. "You cannot falter now."   
  
"Arwen," he begins, but trails off when she reaches out to touch the pendant he now wears around his neck.   
  
"If you trust nothing else," she says intently, "trust this." The necklace is softly glowing.   
  
Aragorn wakes up, the dream drifting away. He reaches instinctively for the necklace, and finds it white and shining. His breath catches, and he sits up—but the it vanishes as soon as he moves. It was only a reflection, he tells himself. A trick of the light. 


End file.
